— Graduation Address to the University of the Witwatersrand, 1980
HOW SHALL WE LOOK AT EACH OTHER THEN?
Our poet, Mongane Wally Serote, writes:
So we shall have buried apartheid—
How shall we look at each other then,
How shall we shake hands. .
What shall we look like
When that sunrise comes
. . I ask my people
For we have said
South Africa belongs to all
who live in it.
And an American analyst of world problems wrote recently:
The choice of what to remember. . is also a way of recommending choices for the present and the future.
There is a lot of forgetting to do, in South Africa. Yet it should not begin before we face what we are in relation to what we wish to become. Progressive forces in our country are pledged to one of the extraordinary events in world social history: the complete reversal of everything that, for centuries, has ordered the lives of all our people, under all the successive governmental avatars of racism — conquest, colonialism, white republicanism — and that has culminated, again and again, in violence.
We know we have to face the kind of legacy, in terms of human relations, apartheid is leaving us. There is, there will be, an aftermath which can’t be tackled without majority rule under a bill of rights, but which won’t evanesce because of these legal victories over oppression. Just as there are people physically maimed by the struggle between white power and black liberation, there is psychological, behavioural damage that all of us in South Africa have been subject to in some degree, whether we know it or not, whether we are whites who have shut eyes and electronically-controlled gates on what was happening to blacks, or whether we are blacks who have been transported and dumped where the government wished, tear-gassed and shot, detained, forced into exile, or have left to join the liberation army which came into being when no other choice remained. Violence has become the South African way of life.
Violence has been with us a long, long time as a pure expression of racism. In its latest avatars, it is still surely a manipulation of that same racism: an end product of old colonialist ideas of divide and rule in the sophisticated Verwoerdian version of grab and rule — take the land and make kinglets of those given a backing of white government’s power in ethnic enclaves. But more of that later.
Does violence imply hate? Personally, I’m prepared to say that hatred towards whites — and in the extreme conditions of racism in South Africa — has been and is rare among South African blacks. I have lived here all my life, I have been in many situations where hate could have revealed itself, I have talked in open mood with many people, when we have been sober and when we have had our inhibitions loosened by a drink or two: I have seen and read much — and, yes, I’ve met bitterness, hard words, but hate — so unmistakable, so frightening, has not been there.
Hate kills. It is ugly to have to quantify deaths. But how many white civilians have been killed by black Freedom Fighters between 1990 and the time when the liberation movement resorted to arms in 1961?
Sixty-six.
The precise figure comes from no less an authority than Major-General Herman Stadler, given in August 1990.
The figure for black civilians killed by whites, beginning, if you like, with the Sharpville massacre in 1960, runs into many thousands; no-one really knows how many, counting deaths in detention along with those brought about by direct police action.
And now we have four thousand contemporary deaths in which black people have killed one another. These kinds of bloody disputes, described by the media as ‘black on black violence’, with the implication that such violence must be tribal, are, we know, basically political. To put it bluntly but not simplistically, without the migratory labour system where, in single-sex hostels, thousands of men have no bonding but herdbonding, without the chaotic overcrowding of black townships and squatter camps where these men are set down among people who themselves have been herded together, dispossessed under the Group Areas act of the places where they used to live, the unbearable tensions that arise over anything — often something as basic as the communal use of a water tap — would not come about. Without the division of the country into so-called national states, which the de Klerk government has abandoned as a failure without being energetic about seeking to undo the damage that has been done, there would have been no personal power base of a Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi from which a private army, strengthened by the third fist of white extremists and mercenaries, could attack trade unionists and the mass democratic movement, inevitably drawing counter-violence from these, and spilling over into a Terror comprised of further partisan tensions among the surrounding populace.
But the habit of violence has been instilled, and this is a problem we know will be inherited by a new South Africa. The vocabulary of violence has become the common speech of both black and white.
Among whites, with the phenomenon of no less than seventy white extremist organizations (some consisting of a handful of people, others of considerable numbers), I would say that hate is the motive of violence. We have seen the disgusting banners these people hold up. We have heard the venom towards blacks shouted under the sign of a new version of the swastika. But apart from this white minority, I believe destructive emotions among whites stop short of hate. For fear does not always go inextricably with hate. And the prevailing emotion among whites is fear; fear of retribution for all that has been done to blacks by whites’ forefathers, by governments for whom they themselves have voted; for all that they themselves have done by their own actions and — for their silence, their turning away with closed eyes. Fear of losing privilege; if they can be convinced that they won’t lose their lives, they yet see themselves about to be skinned of their privileges of being white. But subconsciously they understand hate as the useless emotion it is — even if this is understood only in terms of what it could do for them, now: precisely nothing.
They channel their fears more pragmatically. In Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s famous novel about the decaying Sicilian aristocracy’s tactics during the invasion of Garibaldi’s republican troops, one of the princelings says: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ In other words, ‘Let’s make all the changes necessary to hold off losing our privilege.’
We have to learn to see the paradox there.
Resentment is a potential source of violence among us. Resentment, while distinct from hate, distorts and maims human relations. Resentment comes to the privileged after privilege has been justly taken away; resentment is something that has been with the oppressed all their lives, for generations, and that is likely to remain, blown upon by freedom to glow from under the ashes of past oppression, in the attitudes of many blacks towards whites, after apartheid. We shall have to find ways other than violence to resolve both kinds of resentment.
Much is made, in the outside world and at home, among those in opposition to real change or determined to manage it for their own ends, of cultural differences as a source of violence between blacks and whites in South Africa. But if we turn away from the obsession with group categories and the neglect of everyday, individual relationships upon which, in the end, human relationships depend, we find that ways of life, mores and manners forced upon us by apartheid laws, down to the details of which toilet we could use, and by custom, to the grading of butchers’ meat between general cuts, ‘servants’ meat’ and ‘pets’ meat’—these ways of life that we’ve been born to have created differences between black and white that are neither the product of any separate tradition, religion, etc., nor a matter of ethnic temperament.